'A diary is an assassin's cloak which we wear when we stab a comrade in the back with a pen', wrote William Soutar in 1934. But a diary is also a place for recording everyday thoughts and special occasions, private fears and hopeful dreams. The Assassin's Cloak gathers together some of the most entertaining and inspiring entries for each day of the year, as writers ranging from Queen Victoria to Andy Warhol, Samuel Pepys to Adrian Mole, pen their musings on the historic and the mundane. Spanning centuries and international in scope, this peerless anthology pays tribute to a genre that is at once the most intimate and public of all literary forms. This new updated edition is published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the book's original publication.

"Thren Felhorn is the greatest assassin of his time. All the thieves' guilds of the city are under his unflinching control. If he has his way, death will soon spill out from the shadows and into the streets. Aaron is Thren's son, trained to be heir to his father's criminal empire. He's cold, ruthless--everything an assassin should be. But when Aaron risks his life to protect a priest's daughter from his own guild, he glimpses a world beyond piston, daggers, and the iron rule of his father"--Page 4 of cover.

With 170 contributors, a scope that is peerless, international and crosses centuries The Assassin's Cloak pays tribute to a fascinating genre that is at once the most intimate and public of all literary forms. There are several diary excerpts for every day of the year beginning with Samuel Pepys and along the way we meet cads and charmers, sailors and psychopaths, rock stars and prima ballerinas, gossips, drunks, snobs, lechers and lovers. There is humour and tragedy, history and the humdrum, often recoded on the same day or in the same entry.

When he awakens, he is standing naked, holding a sword adorned in red goo, his insides burning. Five dismembered bodies crowd his feet. He wonders if this is normal as he struggles to remember who he is. Adopting the name DuHero, he innocently brings joy, harm, and death to hundreds of thousands of creatures and uncountable extinction to the servants of the Ovulum Empire in the land of Forever. As a result of his unorthodox thinking and natural innocence, DuHero becomes revered by a dominant culture of violent, facetious jokers; loved by a kingdom of female, man-hating, pacifist fighters; and hunted by a powerful hybrid race of greedy idiots. Flagrot the Goon befriends DuHero to gain access to secrets the Goon anticipates will give him power over the other denizens of Forever. The other races suspect a shift in power and mobilize against him. DuHero, a lost man, tries to adapt to a land filled with contradiction, corruption, and craziness. His contributions lead to catastrophic changes to Forever's landscape. His Gooniness, along with his perceived innocence, brings people to rethink beliefs, motivates their ambitions, and causes death and destruction far beyond what any power monger has created in the past.

In this unique and astonishing book, Dr. Lung not only traces the complete history of the hashishin, but explains the rules of Islamic warfare and the true concept of jihad.

Celaena Sardothien is Adarlan's most feared assassin. As part of the Assassins' Guild, her allegiance is to her master, Arobynn Hamel, yet Celaena listens to no one and trusts only her fellow killer-for-hire, Sam. In these action-packed prequel novellas - together in one edition for the first time - Celaena embarks on five daring missions. They take her from remote islands to hostile deserts, where she fights to liberate slaves and seeks to avenge the tyrannous. But she is acting against Arobynn's orders and could suffer an unimaginable punishment for such treachery ...Explore the dark underworld of this kick-ass heroine and find out how the legend begins in the five page-turning prequel novellas to the New York Times bestselling Throne of Glass series.

Hazel Lynn has spent her entire life preparing to take on the role of Gatekeeper between the Summer Court and the mortal realm. With her entire family bound into service to Faerie, she doesn’t exactly have a choice in the matter, but she's made it her mission to keep the peace between humans and fae -- enforced by her blade, if necessary. Her plans go sideways when she's called to take on the deadly Gatekeeper's Trials and assigned a stuck-up half-fae mentor who hates humans like her. He might be pretty to look at, but he has no intention of giving her an easy time of it. But things go from bad to dire when the King of the Summer Court is assassinated. Worse, all the signs point to a human being responsible. Since Hazel and her family are the only humans permitted to enter the King's domain, the blame lands squarely on them. Before long, Hazel's aggravating new mentor is the only person in Faerie she can trust not to sentence her to death on the spot… assuming he isn't the murderer himself. With her loved ones' fates resting in her hands, it's up to Hazel to catch the killer before the vengeful Sidhe take out their wrath on the rest of humanity. This boxed set contains the complete Gatekeeper's Trials trilogy: Hidden Crown, Hidden Court, and Hidden Power. Keywords: urban fantasy, faeries, magic, portal fantasy, folklore, fairy tales, contemporary fantasy, fae urban fantasy series, complete fantasy series, Seelie Court, Unseelie Court, crown, throne, urban fantasy series, British fantasy, ghost mystery, female protagonist urban fantasy, ghosts, post-apocalyptic fantasy, Scotland, action urban fantasy, myths and legends